Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf's Inks by Ted Bishop
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Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf’s Inks by Ted Bishop Figure 1: gall nuts and gum arabic, author photo. want to thank Elizabeth Willson-Gordon for inviting me, and the whole com- mittee (Claire Battershill, Nicola Wilson) for their superb organization. It’s wonderful to be back at the University of Reading, an institution that invests Iin archival research and chooses a Vice-Chancellor who writes with a fountain pen. Since I was last here my work has taken me in new directions, both literal and liter- ary—to Texas, Italy, and James Joyce for Riding with Rilke: Refections on Motorcycles and Books, from the ballpoints of Buenos Aires to Uzbekistan and the Quran for Te Social Life of Ink—but both books open with an episode from my Virginia Woolf research. I was a young Virginia Woolf scholar working in the British Museum Li- brary, and, I found myself reading a letter I had read in print dozens of times before. Anybody who works on Woolf practically knows it by heart, it’s reprinted so ofen. It begins: Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness… I felt a physical shock. I was holding Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. I lost any bodily sense, felt I was spinning into a vortex, a connection that collapsed the intervening decades. Tis note wasn’t a record of an event—this was the event itself. I turned the sheet over. Getting a Hold on Haddock 3 Tere Leonard had written in green ink the date: 11/5/41. Tis detail set of an unexpected afershock. I had seldom thought of him, of how he had had to wait twenty-one days before the body was found. Tree long weeks, an- swering questions from Te Times, taking calls from friends. Ten a group of teenagers, throwing rocks at a log in the river, found it was not a log at all and dragged what was once Virginia Woolf ashore. (Riding 34–35) Te episode taught me about the impact of the material text, but what I hadn’t con- sidered was that I was responding to ink. Ink testifes to the presence of a body in a particular place at a particular time, a fact more vivid to us today in the non-space of the internet. Woolf’s was a life lived in ink (as are many of ours) yet ink is a substance so ubiq- uitous we don’t see it, we see through it. I began my academic life immersed in Woolf’s style, with no concern for the materialities of her texts. I spent hours transcribing the Jacob’s Room manuscript but when Elizabeth Willson-Gordon asked me over cofee the other day about ink blots I couldn’t remember any—I never looked at the ink. Yet Anthea Callen, writing about the Impressionist painters, insists, “Any work of art is determined frst and foremost by the materials available to the artist, and by the artist’s ability to manipulate those materials” (Ball 5). Today I want to consider the substrate of her work, the actual stuf it’s made of. I’m going to talk about three kinds of ink that defned Woolf’s life: (1) iron gall ink—the ink of ofcial documents; (2) printers’ ink, the ink of the Hogarth Press; and (3) writing ink, the ink in which she created. [I pointed to the hammer, jars, and bags of material laid out on the table and warned the audience that in a few minutes they would be conscripted as ink-making apprentices.] Iron-gall ink On that August day in 1912 when Virginia married Leonard at the St. Pancras Registry ofce her transition from Steven to Woolf would have been consecrated in iron-gall ink. Tis was the ink used for birth, marriage, and death certifcates, for house deeds and court documents. Iron-gall ink is the medium of history. Te writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls wrote with it, Leonardo da Vinci drew with it, Bach composed in it, and Shakespeare punned on it (in Twelfh Night Sir Toby urges Sir Andrew, “Let there be gall enough in thy ink…” combining rancour and pigment), as would Virginia Woolf in Orlando. Gall nuts are not nuts, they are pathological growths, “vegetable antibod- ies,” produced by oak trees in response to eggs laid by gall wasps in the sof tissue of the tree. For permanence there was nothing better than gall nut ink. Its virtue is that it does not sit on the surface, it reacts with the collagen in parchment or the cellulose in paper, forming a chemical bond, so that it cannot be altered. Te dark side of this power to bond is that it can destroy what it seeks to preserve, leaving brown-haloed holes where once were musical notes, poetry, or deal-sealing signatures. Tis is because, if you don’t have the proportions right, one by-product of the reactions between the iron sulphate and the tannic acid of the gall nuts is sulphuric acid (Bishop, Ink 245). 4 Virginia Woolf and the World of Books Figure 2: Ink ingredients, Cobb. All ink is composed of three basic ingredients: a pigment to give it colour, a vehicle to make it fow, and a binder to make it stick. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, people made their own ink. It’s very simple—“cottage science”—as a curator assured me. [Here I announced that Elizabeth Willson-Gordon was going to crush the gall-nuts, and that audience members were going to grind them in the mortar and pestles (ten strokes each, then pass it on), then we would mix the powdered galls with gum arabic (the binder) and ferrous sulphate (which combines with the tannin of the gall nuts to make the pigment), and fnally combine them with one of the four traditional vehicles: water, wine, vinegar, and beer. Elizabeth bashed the gall nuts in a folded-over section of the London Times, shaking the table and rattling the water glasses. “Is that good enough?” she asked. It was not. Gall nuts are as hard as walnut shells, and the smaller you can make the fragments with the hammer the less onerous the grinding with the pestle. She wacked them again.] Printers’ Ink Iron gall ink registered the Woolf’s marriage, but it was printers’ ink that consolidated their union. As Hermione Lee says, “Te story of the Press is, in a way, the story of their marriage….Tey instituted themselves as a couple on the title page of their frst publication, two stories ‘written and printed by Virginia Woolf and L.S. Woolf…and from then on (until 1938 [when John Lehmann became a partner]) their joint names became the sign of a marriage which was also an imprint” (362–63). Te two basic forms of ink—writing ink and printing ink—should have diferent names because they’re as diferent as water is from syrup. Philip Ruxton calls printers’ ink a “glutinous adhesive mass” (1), a description I like because the syllables move as slowly as a thick varnish oozing out of the jar: and it was this varnish that was the Getting a Hold on Haddock 5 salient element in print technology. Every schoolchild knows that Johann Gutenberg revolutionized the Western world by inventing the printing press. But every school- child is wrong—printing presses had been in use long before, not only for block printing but, in Korea, with movable metal type. Te real breakthrough was an ink that would spread evenly on and adhere to the type an ink that, unlike the thin water-based ink Asian ink, was oil based. Gutenberg boiled down linseed oil until it thickened (and ofen spontaneously combusted—in the years to come it would burn down printing houses, and may have started one of the great fres of London), a technique he learned from painters, who had developed the new medium of oil paint (Bishop, Ink 100). [Here we passed around a can of goopy printers’ ink with some thin plastic gloves so people could get a feel of it. Te ink was supplied by Geof Wyeth, who had given a fabu- lous typesetting tutorial the day before in the University of Reading’s Printing Technology department—they have the Gutenberg press used in the BBC documentary with Stephen Fry, “Te Machine Tat Made Us,” as well as a table-top press similar to the one the Woolfs started out on.] Figure 3: table-top press, University of Reading, author photo. Te Woolfs ofer diferent motives for their purchase of the press—Leonard said it was to provide a calming diversion for Virginia / Virginia said she wanted something to drag Leonard away from the tiresome Webbs, who were consuming his time—but they were united in their enthusiasm. Virginia writes to Vanessa on 26 April 1917, “Our press ar- rived on Tuesday….We get so absorbed we can’t stop; I see that real printing will devour one’s entire life” (L2 150). A month later her enthusiasm is unabated; she tells Vanessa “I can hardly tear myself away to go to London, or see anyone. We have just started print- ing Leonards story; I haven’t produced mine yet, but there’s nothing in writing compared 6 Virginia Woolf and the World of Books with printing” (L2 156).